Alan Canfora stands against the tree he used to shield himself from bullets fired by Ohio National Guardsmen on May 4th, 1970, during student anti-Vietnam War protests on the Kent State University campus. Canfora was shot in the wrist. Four unarmed students were shot to death.

Mary Ann Vecchio kneels by the body of a student shot to death on the campus of Kent State University, in Kent, Ohio, on May 4, 1970. Ohio National Guardsmen fired into a crowd of unarmed anti-Vietnam War demonstrators, killing four.

KENT, Ohio  Forty springs ago, on the day the Vietnam War came home as it never had before, Mary Ann Vecchio was there. She's the girl in the haunting photo — crying, kneeling over the student's body.

That was Kent State University, May 4, 1970, a few days after Richard Nixon, who'd campaigned for president on an implicit promise to end the war, widened it by invading Cambodia.

Across the nation, students protested. At Kent State, where two days earlier the ROTC building was burned down, National Guardsmen fired into a crowd and killed four unarmed students, the closest of whom was nearly a football field away.

Vecchio found Jeffrey Miller dead on the ground, a moment captured by a student photographer.

Rarely has an American home front been so traumatized — Yale historian Jay Winter calls the Kent State shootings "a wound in the nation's history" — and for a time the school was so ashamed it shortened its name to "Kent," changed its logo and ended its annual May 4 observances.

But things have changed in 40 years, during which the United States left Vietnam and entered Iraq and Afghanistan. Now, a campus that unwillingly became synonymous with protest is more focused on remembering opposition to that war than opposing the current ones.

Unlike Vietnam, the wars America now fights have never really come home. Students don't worry about getting drafted. The campus anti-war group is inactive. The big cause is Haiti, the big issue the cost and availability of parking.

"There's no strong opposition to it," junior Kassandra Meholick says of the fighting today, "and no strong support for it."

Although there's little of the real thing here, student anti-war protest is studied in class, chronicled in archives and commemorated on monuments, markers and even a postcard sold in the bookstore.

May 4 has become a teachable moment, part of what President Lester Lefton calls Kent State's "brand." A documentary on the shootings is shown at freshman orientation. "You feel like you're part of history," says Meholick, of Harrisburg, Pa. "Something significant happened on this campus."

This year Kent State has taken new steps to acknowledge and make sense of the incident. An application to add the site of the shootings to the National Register of Historic Places — rare for an event less than 50 years old — was approved by the Interior Department. A self-guided "May 4 Walking Tour," featuring trail markers and audio narration by civil rights leader Julian Bond, debuts next month. A visitors center is planned.

A trauma is turning into history, objectified for students and visitors, some of whom walk the site of the shootings like a Civil War battlefield. The campus is a sort of museum of protest, in which something raw and wild has been stuffed for study and shelved for display.

There is the granite May 4 Memorial (when it was dedicated in 1990, a daffodil was planted for every American killed in Vietnam). A May 4 archive contains artifacts such as a student's shirt with a bullet hole through the back and spent M1 shell casings. Four spaces in a parking lot are marked off with light posts to indicate where the four students died.

Many students today are inspired by their example. Krista Napp, a junior, sees May 4 as a precedent for courageous anti-war protest. Meholick, president of the College Republicans, sees a connection between anti-war protests back then and the current anti-tax "Tea Party" movement. "Some people draw a relationship to the students who stood up against the government in 1970," she says. "They're both grass-roots movements."

Vecchio, who despite a broken foot will return to campus for May 4 observances, says Kent State had to face its legacy: "It's something that happened that you have to respect. It was never going to go away. You can't shove it under the rug."

She ought to know. She spent years, she says, "trying to outrun that picture." But she could not forget the sight of Jeff Miller any more than America can forget the sight of her.

'Eradicate the problem'

In 1970 the United States was in what the President's Commission on Campus Unrest later would call its most divisive period since the Civil War. The Vietnam War, stalemated after five years of intense U.S. ground combat, was the target of increasingly aggressive, sometimes violent protests.

When Nixon announced the Cambodia invasion on April 30, campuses erupted.

In Kent, some students rioted outside the bars downtown the following night, a Friday. Saturday night, protesters set fire to the ROTC building, and slashed firemen's hoses. Even before that, Gov. James Rhodes, a Republican, called out the Ohio National Guard.

He called the protesters "the worst type of people that we harbor in America," and said: "We are going to eradicate the problem. We are not going to treat the symptoms."

On Monday several hundred students gathered on the campus commons to rally against the war and the Guard's presence. The soldiers used tear gas to move the students off the commons, followed them up and over a small hill, and formed ranks in a practice football field.

A standoff ensued. Students kept their distance, chanting slogans — "Pigs off campus!" — and hurling rocks and bottles, few of which reached their targets. Then the Guardsmen retraced their steps up the hill, heading back toward the commons.

The crowd had swelled to several thousand, including protest supporters, observers and bystanders. Many of them now relaxed; the confrontation seemed over.

In 12.53 seconds, 28 Guardsmen got off 61 to 67 shots. (Some fired into the ground or the air; 48 Guardsmen did not shoot at all, according to the FBI.)

Vecchio found Jeff Miller, whom she'd gotten to know over the past few days, bleeding to death. There was nothing she could do. She screamed, "Oh my God!"

Also killed: protester Allison Krause; Bill Schroeder, an ROTC student who'd been watching the protest and was shot in the back; and Sandy Scheuer, who was walking to class.

Nine students were wounded. One, Dean Kahler, was shot in the back as he lay on the ground. The bullet left him paralyzed for life. Another, Alan Canfora, ducked behind an oak tree as a bullet passed through his right wrist.

Canfora says today that after the Cambodia invasion, "We wanted to bring the war home. But we never expected that."

The shootings provoked America's first national student strike, closing hundreds of campuses, and inspired an anti-war anthem — Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young'sOhio, which asked, "What if you knew her/and found her dead on the ground?" Newsweek put the photo of Vecchio on its cover under the headline "Nixon's Home Front."

A Gallup Poll found that only 11% of Americans faulted the Guard; 58% thought the demonstrators were partly responsible for the carnage.

Based on an FBI investigation, the Justice Department concluded that the Guardsmen were never in danger and that their explanation — they were surrounded, outnumbered and fired in self-defense — was a fabrication. Later that year, a presidential commission called the shootings "unnecessary, unwarranted, and inexcusable."

A state grand jury declined to indict any Guardsman, a federal judge dismissed civil rights charges, and no one spent a day in jail. In 1979, the state paid $675,000 to the wounded students and the families of the dead to settle a civil suit. The Guardsmen signed a statement of regret, not apology.

Many felt there was nothing for which to apologize. Ron Snyder, a Guard captain that day, says the shootings should not have occurred, but were no massacre: "A massacre is something that's happening in the Sudan."

Kent State's enrollment declined almost 20% over the next decade and did not pass the 1970 level for 17 years. Around Ohio it was known as "Chaos U."

The shootings marked a turning point in the student anti-war movement, radicalizing some and frightening off others; helped seal the eventual demise of the military draft; and, in the opinion of his aide Bob Haldeman, marked the beginning of Nixon's descent into the political paranoia that led to the Watergate scandal.

Although it happened in broad daylight before thousands of witnesses and was captured in hundreds of photographs and on film and audiotape, Kent State remains what the writer William A. Gordon calls "a murder mystery."

Many of the key figures are dead, including then-governor Rhodes. In 2000, a year before he died, Rhodes toldThe Columbus Dispatchthat Kent State "was a terrible thing. ... But no one plans a train wreck, either. It just happened. And life goes on."

So do the questions: Did the Guardsmen fire out of fear, or anger, or on command? What explained their seemingly sudden and synchronized volley?

Jerry Lewis, a sociology professor, was in the parking lot when the Guard opened fire. He's been studying the question ever since: "I don't think we'll ever know why they fired. I don't think they know."

The survivor

The girl in the famous Kent State photo was not a Kent State student but a 14-year-old runaway from Opa-locka, Fla., who hated the war.

After the shooting, Vecchio fled campus. Her father recognized her in the newspaper and contacted the police. The FBI found her in Indianapolis and sent her home.

She was infamous. Florida Gov. Claude Kirk, a Republican, criticized her for being at the rally, and asked, "Is she part of the plot?" The family got letters saying she was a communist and responsible for the deaths. Years later, her mother would ask, "Can you imagine a 14-year-old girl having to deal with that?"

Vecchio's subsequent problems — she ran away again, was arrested for marijuana possession and loitering, wound up in a juvenile home —– were well chronicled. When Kent State's May 4 Memorial was dedicated in 1990, she told the Orlando Sentinel that the shootings "really destroyed my life, and I don't want to talk about it." As for the memorial, she said, "Big deal. It has nothing to do with my life."

Eventually, she made her peace with May 4. She came to feel that the incident had helped shorten the war and given Americans "a little more freedom."

Today Vecchio is 54, divorced, and living with her mother and dog on a farm in Northern Florida she calls "my refuge." She works at a hospital as a respiratory therapist.

She looks forward to going back to campus each May 4, when the daffodils have bloomed, and talking with students. "They're nervous when they come up," she says. "But I just talk to them, and before long we're like long lost friends."

When they talk, she's realizes anew the importance of remembering what happened that spring day.

"I tell them it shows what can happen if the evildoers get too much power. They can take your freedom away. You could be walking to school, and what happened back then could happen to you."

To report corrections and clarifications, contact Standards Editor Brent Jones. For publication consideration in the newspaper, send comments to letters@usatoday.com. Include name, phone number, city and state for verification. To view our corrections, go to corrections.usatoday.com.

Guidelines: You share in the USA TODAY community, so please keep your comments smart and civil. Don't attack other readers personally, and keep your language decent. Use the "Report Abuse" button to make a difference. Read more.